Review: Night Patrol

Murray Langston stars as a mild-mannered but whiny cop who has a side gig as a paper bag-wearing stand-up comedian of questionable talent (dubbed ‘The Unknown Comic’). The two jobs end up crossing over when a criminal starts to go around town committing crimes whilst wearing- you guessed it- a paper bag over their head. At one point we start to see a third person in similar garb. Meanwhile, a pretty female police officer (Linda Blair as ‘Sue Perman’) has a none too subtle crush on our protagonist. Jaye B. Morgan turns up as the manager of the Unknown Comic, Billy Barty plays the flatulent dwarf police captain, Jack Riley is an oddball shrink, and Pat Paulson plays Langston’s veteran police partner, who is into cheap, meaningless sex.

 

From the director of “Blood Diner” (a horrible film, by the way), Jackie Kong comes this pathetic 1984 comedy that makes you appreciate that other police comedy from 1984 (“Police Academy”) all the more. Or at least the one “Police Academy” film worth seeing, “Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol” (C’mon, Sharon Stone, Bobcat Goldthwait, and David Spade as a supposed skateboard punk- what’s not to like?). It’s not that the jokes themselves are inherently incompetent in theory, though many certainly are, it’s more that the delivery and timing of every single one of them is horribly botched.

 

The comedic talent involved here is in direct contradiction to the terms comedic and talent. Most of the jokes are in the pun-heavy vein of “Airplane!”/“Flying High!”, but a really cheap, even lower brow version. For starters, Blair’s name is a terrible pun, and then there’s lines like; ‘I’ve known you ever since you were a clerk, Kent’. Ugh. About the only one that came close to making me laugh was a joke about cock fights, and yes, it indeed goes there. Canadian so-called comedian Murray Langston (who along with co-star Jaye B. Morgan appeared on “The Gong Show”) in particular is a complete hack, and his alter-ego The Unknown Comic isn’t any better (though the paper bag disguise is a much better one than the blackface he and Paulson adopt in the climax. Yep, blackface, folks. Ah the 80s...) Linda Blair (in the midst of her exploitation movie phase) bares her breasts briefly at the end, Billy Barty farts a lot, and in an early role, Andrew Dice Clay is a truly terrible stand-up comedian. He also plays one in the film. Meanwhile, subtitles are used for no reason whatsoever (the opening credits are even in French!), and Pat Morita’s entire scene is dubbed by a shrieking female voice to no discernible comedic value whatsoever. What’s worse is that he’s playing a rape victim. Yep, Asian jokes and rape jokes all in the same scene. Classy stuff, but then the film is from the producer of “Flesh Gordon”, so what do you expect?

 

Scripted by Langston, Kong, and William A. Levey (director of the infamous “Blackenstein” and writer-director of the less infamous “Skatetown USA”), the film wants to be another “Airplane!” but the talent, laughs, and budget simply aren’t up to snuff.

 

Rating: D-